Discovering that he has a twin brother he has never known about, Schwarzenegger commandeers an inflatable dinghy and starts rowing for the nearest airport.
Meanwhile, back in the states, DeVito is in trouble. He’s a professional con man who also does amateur cons in his spare time. His side line is stealing luxury cars at the airport and selling them to chop shops, and about the time Schwarzenegger is arriving in America, DeVito is thrown into jail for hundreds of dollars of unpaid parking tickets. Schwarzenegger tracks him down in a jail cell and tells him of their secret past. The diminutive DeVito, of course, does not believe this muscular Teuton is his twin. Few would.
But if Schwarzenegger has bail money, DeVito is prepared to play along with him.
Good comedies often have central ideals that are transparently simple. “Twins” is an example. There are giant billboards all over the United States right now, showing DeVito’s picture with the block letters “Schwarzenegger” underneath, and vice versa. It’s a brilliant sell, and a clever idea, but the reason it works so well in the movie is that both Schwarzenegger and DeVito have genuinely tender sides to their natures. You know the movie is a running gag, but somehow there’s a sweetness in their relationship that makes the plot seem less manipulated.
The explanation for their twinship is that both men were the result of a eugenics experiment in which the sperm from six different fathers was combined into a kind of natal milkshake and administered to their mother. The men represented brains, brawn and other attributes, and the woman was as nearly perfect as possible. But the experiment misfired and produced, not one perfect baby, but twins.
“Your brother got all of the good stuff,” DeVito is told years afterward, when he finally confronts the mastermind behind the bizarre experiment. “You got the leftovers.” That’s why Schwarzenegger is an awesome physical specimen who speaks six languages and is a brilliant scientist and DeVito is a small-time hustler who manages to steal the wrong cars - for example, a late-model Cadillac that just happens to have a trunk containing industrial contraband worth millions.
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